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A novel of King Castro

"King of Cuba" follows a tyrant's paranoid final days, parallel path of a luckless exile.

"King of Cuba" by Cristina García From the book jacket
"King of Cuba" by Cristina García From the book jacketRead more

By Cristina García

Scribner. 235 pp. $25

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Reviewed by Luis A. Gómez

The tyrant is now in the sunset of his life, riddled by infirmities and bitter about a revolution disintegrating in front of his eyes.

The many attempts against his life and the crumbling of the facade he struggled to maintain for more than 50 years have resulted in paranoia ("in any given twenty-four hours, somebody, somewhere, was plotting to kill him").

He was always an impulsive man, but now he lashes out at everything and everyone around him, including his brother Fernando, a perpetual lackey of the tyrant whom, in his paranoia, he has occasionally suspected of potential "counterrevolutionary thinking."

The "fake abdication" of power to his brother also raises the deeply rooted pettiness and paranoia of the tyrant (a fictionalized Fidel Castro). He even comments on the fact that the only newspaper in the island nation has published a 10-page spread about him, but his brother's picture was "a quarter inch larger around than his."

In King of Cuba, Cristina García liberally uses historical events and figures to enhance the verisimilitude of the events that will lead to the climax of the attempted assassination of the dictator and his less-than-glorious death.

References such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro's harangue at the United Nations, the Comandante's friendship with his "junior bad boy in Venezuela," and many other historical details abound throughout the novel. Equally, the author uses countless "Cubanisms" and idiomatic expressions in Spanish that are brilliantly placed to produce humor, at times in the most unlikely of places in the narration.

The tyrant perceives death is near. He tries to feed his disintegrating body with flashbacks of the "good old days," when there was not a woman who could resist him and the world worshiped at his feet. The personality García bestows on Fidel is clearly dominated by what the dictator perceives as his sexual prowess and sense of self-grandeur.

But intruding in these moments of remembrance are tormenting visions of his crimes. Principal among these visions are the dissidents in a hunger strike. These are people whom the dictator actually fears, because their act constitutes an insidious undermining of his power. The images include forsaken lovers, peasants executed in the Sierra Maestra, his schoolyard bully experiences, and the Damas de Blanco wailing for the fate of their husbands rotting in the Cabaña prison.

But this novel is not just about Fidel Castro. In fact, the narration is constructed as a binomial. On one side is the tyrant; on the other, the exile Goyo. Under different historical outcomes, Goyo could have been Fidel and the tyrant could have been Goyo. They have nearly identical history. Both are the sons of serial philandering Spanish fathers, from whom they learned to be philanderers themselves. They both attended the same Jesuit school and same university. They are compulsively proud of their sexual prowess and the wake of women used and left behind. They even had an experience with the same woman, Adelita, driven to suicide by the tyrant. Her death is one of the sources of Goyo's deeply rooted hatred for the dictator, for she was his "true life-time love."

Both characters live in unwanted circumstances. For the Comandante, it is the growing irrelevance of his persona, and the increasingly louder forecasts of the end of his era and the revolution. These are realities that are added to the tyrant's awareness that his life is coming to an end and that feed his paranoia. He is further frustrated by his knowledge that those who would succeed him do not have the charisma, strength of character, or desire to follow his footsteps. From the dictator's perspective, there are no worthy successors.

Goyo's life is also an unmitigated disaster. His recently deceased and many times betrayed wife had deteriorated into a collection of plastic surgeries. His son, Goyito, is a basket case of addictions, particularly cocaine and a morbid pursuit of food. Daughter Alina is detached from her father and seems to barely tolerate him.

This novel, for the "initiated" in the political, cultural, and linguistic realities of the two worlds inhabited by Goyo and the Comandante, is an absolute must read. For those not initiated, it should be placed very high on the agenda of books that should be read.

King of Cuba is a major achievement by Cristina García, and it comes on the heels of another equally superb novel, Dreaming in Cuban. This is an author who will leave her mark on contemporary literature.